Can Political Philosophy be Greater Than the Sum of its Ethical Agents?

“It is quite likely that, if we knew more about animal bodies, we could deduce
all their movements from the laws of chemistry and physics. It is already
fairly easy to see how chemistry reduces to physics, i.e. how the differences
between different chemical elements can be accounted for by differences of
physical structure…. We only know in part how to reduce physiology to
chemistry, but we know enough to make it likely that the reduction is
possible.”

Thusly Bertrand Russell summarized scientific reductionist thinking about the
natural world. With some caveats, it is a ruling scientific worldview, or at
least it seems so to a fellow like me who feels just smart enough to pick up a
Scientific American in the waiting room and not get
too confused.

There are nested levels of abstraction in talking about the physical world — not independent and rival explanations, but each level dependent on and
building on the level below. In principle, everything you’re trying to
investigate at the level you’re looking at (say, the liver), should be
describable in terms of elements of the level below, as far down as you want
to go (say, physics).

The terms we use at the higher levels are shorthand descriptions of complex
varieties or categories of arrangements at the next level down, and everything
we describe at the higher layers can — in principle — be described without any
loss of information solely in terms of elements of the layers beneath. (The
reverse, though, is not true: two biologically indistinguishable
enzymes may be subtly different chemically; two chemically indistinguishable
molecules may be subtly different physically, and so forth.)

Each higher level of explanation and abstraction provides a new categorization
and labeling scheme for the behavior of aggregates of elements of the level
below it — but it does not properly add any new elements that are in principle
irreducible (if such an element is not in fact reducible, reducing it
becomes a priority, and the scientists aren’t happy until they’ve come up with
something — so sure are they that something will indeed turn up).

It occurred to me at some point that those political theorists whose points of
view I most respect take the same approach to political philosophy: The
question of what political arrangements are appropriate in a society of
individuals will in all cases — in principle anyway — be reducible to a
question of the appropriate ethical actions of those individuals.

Political philosophy is still important and distinct from ethical philosophy
for the same reason that biologists and chemists don’t just resign their posts
and become physicists — it’s impractical to work on big-stuff problems with
small-stuff abstractions. You need some shorthand. And certain patterns and
regularities are only visible at a larger scale and among the larger
abstractions themselves.

But on the other hand, you need to respect the nature of what you’re doing and
the nested structure of the layers you’re working with. One way to test your
theories at one level is to see if they result in any contradictions at a
lower level. If your theories in chemistry require some electrons to be
positively charged, you either screwed up somewhere or you need to develop a
variety of physics in which positively-charged electrons aren’t absurd. (By
contrast, if new developments in physics require higher layers to accommodate,
say, the weirdness of relativity and quantum mechanics, accommodate them they
must! It is them, and not physics, that must give way.)

Similarly, if your political theories require some individuals to behave
unethically, you need to go back to the drawing board. Liberal political
theorists (not in the liberal/conservative editorial page sense, but the
old-school political philosophy sense) seem to evaluate political systems at
the level of political or societal organization only (is there representation?
is there the rule of law? are decisions made democratically?) while
libertarian/anarchist political theorists are much more likely to train their
microscopes on the realm of personal ethics (e.g. does any element of this
political theory require anyone to violate
the
non-aggression principle?)

Liberal political theorists will attempt to patch over the parts of their
theories that require individuals to behave in ways that may seem unethical by
saying that in such-and-such a case the otherwise unethical behavior
is ethical. But the criteria that make those cases “such-and-such” are often
found to be political-level criteria, not ethical-level criteria — either new
political-level descriptions that are irreducible to ethical-level
descriptions, or ones that if they are reduced to ethical-level descriptions
no longer seem to justify the “such-and-suchness.”

In physical reductionism, the relationship between the levels has a direction.
By this I mean, for instance, that we might say that some element of fluid
dynamics describes the behavior of a large set of molecules in some
circumstance. Or we might say that in some circumstance, these molecules will
behave in a manner described by fluid dynamics. But we wouldn’t say that fluid
dynamics causes molecules to behave in a certain way, or that they
behave in that way in order to comply with the rules of fluid
dynamics. The causation is all in the other direction. Fluid dynamics says
what it says as a result of attempting to describe the behavior of
the underlying physical system.

Which is what makes the liberal political theories and their justifications
difficult for me to swallow. They seem to have this backwards. According to
them, some behavior at the ethical level switches from unethical to ethical
based on the description it is given at the political level, rather than its
description at the political level being based on an analysis of it at the
ethical level. Whereas it seems to me that whether a particular action is
ethical or not should not depend on what political system you’re operating
under or what role the people involved play in that system; rather, whether
the system is reasonable and coherent should depend on whether the individuals
enacting their roles in that system behave ethically in so doing.

If a theory told you that water freezes below 32° except on Tuesdays when it
freezes below 40°, you’d be right to be skeptical. If your experiments showed
that ice was just as liquid at 40° on Tuesdays as any other day, you wouldn’t
be likely to accept as an explanation that, according to the accepted theory,
on Tuesdays liquid water that is colder than 40° is considered to be frozen
regardless of its actual behavior. You’d consider this a flaw in the theory,
not a flaw in the water.

This, anyway, is how my thoughts have wandered along this path. I think there
must be a clearer way of explaining it than this. It seems really simple to me
until I try to articulate it, and then it starts to fray.

For instance, what about these assertions:

it’s unethical to confine someone against their will, but it’s okay if
you’re a prison guard and they’re your prisoner

it’s unethical to strike someone against their will, but it’s okay if
you’re a boxer and they’re your opponent

Are these really from two distinct classes of assertion? Do they
really belong on different levels? The second one seems to me to be close to a
straightforward ethical assertion, but the first one seems to me to be one of
those problematic political assertions that doesn’t disassemble properly. Each
one requires a scaffolding of assumptions about how people play roles in
socially-defined settings.

Of course, you can see that there’s a variety of mutual consent in the second
example and not in the first (a boxer doesn’t consent to be struck,
exactly — he avoids it strenuously — but he certainly consents to
risk being unsuccessful in avoiding it). But how hard would it be for a
liberal political theorist to come up with some similar-sounding quasi-ethical
explanation for the first (the prisoner doesn’t consent to be
confined, but he consented to living in a community where such confinement is
the price one pays for certain behavior). And then how can I qualitatively
distinguish the two explanations?

Also, just how good is my analogy between physical reductionism and ethical
reductionism? In reality, we didn’t start with physics and build chemistry on
top of it, but something much more like the reverse: people observed chemical
behavior, found regularities in it, designed theories, and then the physicists
tried to model the underlying behavior that might produce these regularities
and satisfy these theories. Nowadays the theoretical model is, I think, much
as I described it, but its origin is more complicated and this has
consequences for my analogy. Why shouldn’t we start with a political
theory that satisfies us and then create an ethics that models it? Why
must we start with a foundation before we know what kind of building
we’re constructing?

And worse, my version of the “ethical level” here is exclusively
deontological, is it not? Someone who makes teleological ethical evaluations
might very well conclude that people operating at the “ethical level” ought to
evaluate what they do at a higher level of abstraction if the ends to
be striven for are themselves defined at a higher level (and why
shouldn’t they be?). Some people even give the State itself moral
standing, and assert that we have at least as much of a duty to contribute to
its health or to refrain from harming it as we do with each other. “One ought
to obey the powers that be,” can be an elemental ethical assertion,
or something close to it.

I guess what I’m getting at is: Needs work. I can’t but guess that some better
thinker than I has been over this same ground before and has thought it
through and written it all down, but so far I haven’t been able to find it.
Any pointers?

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